MS Office always slower on Mac?Sorry for that, but I'm not old enough to have worked with any Mac OS less than 10.4. So sorry if I wasn't very explicit in saying that Microsofts Office 2004 was the only one available (for me) at this time. And out of experience I can only state that it has been very slow in comparison to its Windows rivals. (Again, my guess is compatibility). Now 2010/2011 they both are equally slow due to the more complex UI, as I supported with my test-starts further up.

MS Office always slower on Mac?FYI: I'm running a MacBook Pro @ 2.2GHz i7 with 8GB DDR3RAM. Word, PowerPoint, Excel 2011 startup time on Mac ~6s, ~5s & ~5s respectively. Word, PowerPoint & Excel 2010 start up time on Win7 ~5s, ~7s & ~6s respectively. I just tried it out, so don't worry. I recon due to the new layout PC and Mac just has to load much more graphics and so on slowing the startup down for both. The only way to reduce this is by replacing your hard drive with a solid state.